Habitat

Habitat is the fourth album by C’Mon Tigre, the enigmatic world music collective that has been defying boundaries of genre and geography since 2014. Their unique, multi-layered sound blends myriad influences, most prominently the syncopated drums of samba and the exuberant horn melodies of Afrobeat. As the title suggests, the natural environment is the conceptual heartbeat of the album, with lyrics and sonic landscapes combining to explore earth’s richly interconnected abundance of animal and plant life. This is conveyed through a range of languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and even a Hindustani vocal sample on ‘Nomad at Home’. Intriguingly, the lead vocals are throughout altered with a distorted lo-fi radio effect and sound, almost as if they had been produced by Gorillaz.

Featured artists elevate this bewildering variety of sounds. Seun Kuti’s soulful vocals resonate powerfully on the second track ‘The Botanist’, and Brazilian vocalist Xênia França is haunting and hypnotic on ‘Teen Age Kingdom’. Italian singer-songwriter Giovanni Truppi brings an urban hip-hop flavour to his fluid rhymes on ‘Sento un Morso Dolce’, and Arto Lindsay provides jazz-inflected guitar chords on ‘Keep Watching Me’. A wonderfully cerebral, eclectic and ecologically conscious project.